This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Company Misery Loves by Kate Fox (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024).
My Grandmother Attends the Athens Quilt National, 1979
In her world, the fabric recovers what it once
clothed, garments stained or worn so thin
that she had to salvage the best with scissors,
then rock the treadle to piece corduroy to wool
to flannel in a starburst that, like a wood fire,
warms three times. Nothing frivolous, nothing
fancy, except for a burial quilt too bleak to abide
that she edged in lace and pearl buttons taken
from the baptismal dress. Under “Do Not Touch,”
she fingers a manatee’s taffeta fins, the tessellated cape
of a matador, and finally, a school of Escher fish
that shifts into a skein of geese as the pattern moves
from sea to sky. She finally says, “You know, they
did their best, but these quilts aren’t nothing but art.”
Kate Fox is the author of The Company Misery Loves (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), a collection of poems published in July 2024, and two poetry chapbooks: The Lazarus Method, winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Competition (Kent State University Press) and Walking Off the Map (Seven Kitchens Press). Her work has appeared in Great River Review, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, Valparaiso Review, and Pleiades. Her poem “The Heaven of Lost Limbs” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poem, “No Word for Those Who Lose a Child,” was a finalist in Cutthroat Literary Magazine’s Joy Harjo Poetry Competition. She lives in Athens OH with her partner, writer and Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott, and their two English setters, Katie and Patch.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, and Editor-in-Chief at beestung. They are an editor on the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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